Jocularity

The British Royal Family has another scandal, and Colbert gets the giggles.

Is It Okay To Call Them Unpatriotic Now?

Mein Blogovault…good place to find out what’s going on. From there, we learn about this thing which speaks for itself over at Flopping Aces.

Includes a dissertation on whether the clip was made by a liberal or not. It’s valid to record the evidence saying so, but as a practical matter — anyone who contests it, is never going to be convinced anyway.

My method would be quicker: It appears there is a large faction of connected, or unconnected, persons and/or organizations ready to blame lots of things on America, and to credit the United States with absolutely nothing positive in the world. Constantly sliming America, constantly bashing America, constantly calling attention to the skeletons in America’s closet.

Maybe those folks are liberals, maybe they aren’t.

Maybe being a liberal is all about joining that crew, maybe it isn’t.

If this is NOT what being a liberal is all about…let us see some well-known liberals take on the America bashers and try to beat ’em. Liberals seem to be pretty capable of throwing around some pretty nasty words; let’s see them throw some in the direction of the America bashers, if they aren’t all part of the same crowd.

Let’s see it happen. Not holding my breath.

I’m a Lardass Because You Don’t Spend Enough Money

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, makes it a regular habit to probe the thoughts we have that widen the already-gaping chasm between public policy, and public policy that would make some sense. And in that pursuit, we are drawn to, and re-drawn to, and re-drawn to again and again and again, like a moth to a flame…the never-ending issue of people finding new things to worry about, wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy things, when a little bit too much time has slipped by since they’ve had something real to worry about.

Er, about which to worry.

Heh. I’m an example of my own point. Roofs over our heads, food in our guts, you even understand what I’m saying just fine and dandy…and least, with a couple of re-reads, you do…and here we are obsessing over the prepositions I end my sentences with. Well, anyway. Back to the subject at hand.

We just don’t think the same way after Beowulf brings in Grendel’s head, as we do an hour before. The candy machines are installed. The breakrooms in which those candy machines sit, have linoleum and power. The buildings housing those breakrooms, have good foundations, and the swamps that once lay in the spots where those buildings sit on their foundations, have been cleared. Naturally, before the swamps were drained, the snakes were killed. And now that people have nothing more worthy of their carping and complaining, besides the machines eating the dollar and not dropping the right candy…on the very spot where poisonous snakes once slithered…about what shall we worry?

How about this?

THERE now are more overweight people than undernourished, organisers of an international obesity conference claim. The escalating problem, particularly in children, could make today’s generation the first to die before its parents.
:
Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows almost 70,000 extra South Australian adults have joined the growing ranks of obesity since 2001. In 2004-05, 18 per cent, or about 202,800, were obese; 32 per cent, or about 370,000, were overweight. In 2001, 15 per cent, or about 168,400, were obese and 30 per cent, or about 335,800, were overweight.

Campbelltown mother-of-three Kerry Scerri is conscious of protecting her children from becoming obese or overweight.

“I put on extra weight and I know what it’s like to feel uncomfortable with yourself, feel unhappy and wonder what people are saying about you,” said Mrs Scerri, who has been a life member of Jenny Craig for 15 years. “I don’t want to put my kids through that.”

The Dietitians Association of Australia has called on the Federal Government to:

RECOGNISE obesity as a chronic disease under Medicare.

PROVIDE a significant financial commitment to help struggling Australian families get the skills and support they need to feed their families properly. [CAPS in original]

Woo hoo! Things must be going great in Australia. Looks like a few too many opera houses have gone up since anyone has had to worry about losing a leg to a Great White shark, or getting kicked in the head by a kangaroo, or having a dingo eat one of their babies.

It just goes to show what I’ve been saying all along: Too much civilization. Once the snakes are killed and the swamps are drained and the buildings built and the candy machines installed…we, as a species, appear to be incapable of conducting our lives the way we did when we were killing those snakes. We can’t think the same way. It’s like a chunk of our collective brain goes missing. Once the concerns are addressed, the new priority becomes to find more concerns.

Which is fine by itself, I suppose, as long as it’s a linear process. When you have what it takes to build a ten-story building, it’s just the human instinct for progress to try to find a way to build a twenty-story building…and it makes sense that we’re incapable of worrying about twenty-story buildings when the swamp has not yet been cleared so the foundation can be set. Put some buildings on this continent, when you’re done, put some buildings on that continent over there — then, build a spaceship, and conquer space. Progress.

But this is not a linear process. Not when you have egghead scientists twisting the arm of the Australian government to give money to fat people, so fat people might stop being fat…which, I’ll wager, nobody anywhere is going to bet some serious coin or some left testicles is what’s really going to happen.

No, this is a cyclical process. This is an empire getting ready to fall. Only the brain-damaged can recite this in a one-line summary, with a straight face. We got all these fleshy kids…we’re worried that a whole generation of Augustus Gloops could expire before their parents because they’re so chubby…government has to appropriate some funds, to give these porkers and their parents the skills they need to thin the kids down. Yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhh…right.

No, here is the next thing about which the international community can get worried, now that the swamps are cleared and the buildings are built. How about this: Scientists, who have figured out that if their research says the right stuff, it will have a positive effect on their grant money. It’s been a problem for a long time now. Give me anyone willing to argue with me about it and tell me it’s not a problem, I can change their mind, toot-sweet, simply by citing some scientific research such a critic would happen to not like, and I’ll have an instant convert. In other words, we all know this is true, some of us just choose an opportune time to admit it.

And so what we have come to call “science” is now something quite different from what science really is…and we are blind. We have been commanded — or Australia has been commanded, anyhow — to take as our next priority in the continuing human struggle, the appropriation of public funds to turn fat kids into not-so-fat kids. EXCUUUUUUSE ME…it’s cheaper to make a skinny kid, in the first place, than a tub-o-goo. Turning out skinny kids instead of fat kids, should produce a freakin’ savings — from whence arises the necessity to pay for it?

I mean, I’m sure there’s a decent answer to the question…but how come nobody seems to at least be asking it in the first place?

Thing I Know #113. A crisis precedes logical thinking. Logical thinking precedes a solution to the crisis. Too long a time without a crisis, precedes indulgence and sloppy thinking. Indulgence and sloppy thinking precede the next crisis.
Thing I Know #125. They tell me rules are needed for civilization, but I notice civilization is needed for the rules. Civilization arises from where a wild frontier was tamed. On the taming of a wild frontier by a rulebook, history stands mute.
Thing I Know #130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.
Thing I Know #146. The day a lingering challenge finally abates, atrophy starts setting in. People lose their capacity for dealing with the challenge; slowly on their own, and much more quickly in groups.

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… IV

What the–

Did he just kill off Jan??

Completely Uncalled For

Okay, now after that last one let’s go for something light. One of my son’s favorite jokes…transformed…

Fumento on AIDS

In ’93, my mother died from a cancerous brain tumor. I was a subscriber to the American Spectator, and I couldn’t help but notice the irony, given my personal situation, in the writings of one Michael Fumento.

Bill Clinton was a brand-new President back then, and he was bound and determined to make sure that what our Government spent on the AIDS epidemic, as vast a sum as that may have been under the administration of George H. W. Bush, be nevertheless multiplied. Which, in due course, it was.

It’s 2006. We still have AIDS.

What took my mother’s life thirteen years ago, was something we had been reading about clear back in the seventies: Cancer. Cancer of this, Cancer of that. And the irony is not lost on me: In order to catch AIDS, you have to do…certain things which we will leave unmentioned in this forum. To catch cancer, you have to do…who knows what? Sunbathe, eat lots of salty food. Well, my mother did neither one of those, but in 1991 she figured out her brain was working, you know, not quite properly. So she went in for a CAT Scan, and lo and behold, there was a cloud. Eighteen months later she was worm food.

Now I ask you. What’s scarier? I mean, really.

So while I freely confess to a personal bias, nevertheless, regardless of the reason, I am solidly on the Fumento bandwagon.

Fumento likens a rational analysis of the AIDS crisis, which is sadly lacking, nowadays…to John Snow’s analysis of the cholera epidemic in mid-nineteenth-century London.

The entire science of epidemiology � which began when London physician John Snow determined that cholera cases in his city clustered around a single water pump � depends on identifying risk factors to ameliorate them. In Snow�s case, he simply removed the pump handle and the epidemic ended.

He was lucky he didn�t have to deal with activists carrying signs reading: “Water doesn�t cause cholera; ignorance and prejudice cause cholera!”

Indeed. Isn’t it funny? What we call “science” plays this game of leapfrog with what we call “truth”…sometimes in front of it, sometimes over it, sometimes under it, sometimes in back of it. But never are the two concepts more distant, than when mind-boggling numbers of human lives are at stake.

Found more info on the John Snow Pump Handle thingy over here.

Happy reading.

This Is Good XXI

Wuzzadem on the Plame fiasco. Of course this is from April, but it’s not as if anything’s changed since then.

Oh it has? Or…sorry, I can’t remember. Oh well. Funny stuff. Does what good humor should do: It reflects reality.

Press Alt Tab, The Boss Is Coming

Nobody ever reads this blog, especially on Fridays, but if anybody is reading blogs on a Friday we all know what that means: They’re too lazy to do any more work, everybody else is too lazy to count on them for anything anyway, but they’re not quite out the door on the way home just yet because they’re too lazy to shut down the computer.

Hey I’m in your corner guys. We champion hard work here, and coming through in a pinch when people are counting on you for stuff…but who the hell’s counting on anybody on a Friday afternoon? And for the guy who brings home the bacon, let’s face it…paychecks to deposit, movies to rent, take-out food and dry-cleaning to pick up, getting the family fed by seven, asshole drivers everywhere…the logistics before the weekend can get a little thick. So I understand, a little bit of lighter fare in the blogosphere is kind of welcome.

Who better to provide it than Holtie’s House (his website generally NSFW though).

AUSSIE COMPUTER TERMINOLOGY

LOG ON: Adding wood to make the barbie hotter.

LOG OFF: Not adding any more wood to the barbie.

MONITOR: Keeping an eye on the barbie.

DOWNLOAD: Getting the firewood off the ute.

HARD DRIVE: Making the trip back home without any
cold tinnies.

KEYBOARD: Where you hang the ute keys.

WINDOW: What you shut when the weather’s cold.

SCREEN: What you shut in the mozzie season.

BYTE: What mozzies do.

Read the whole thing…

Just An Observation

I’m forty, which, for those of you under forty, means some things; they’ll come as no surprise to you. My body has begun to give me subtle clues that it’s time for the long shutdown process to start. By the time I’m fifty, it will make those clues un-subtle, and convey them to everyone around me as well. I have doubts that my career is paying back all the energy I have invested into it. I’m reassured by the fact that many forty-year-olds have the same concern, but that very few fifty- and sixty-year-olds seem to. So in the next few years, either the concern itself will pass into oblivion, or my opportunity to do something about it will go there.

I think I know things because I’m forty. A lot of people think I need more time before I know anything. I see nearly all of those folks are under forty.

Here’s one thing I notice…it’s not pithy enough to be a Thing I Know, so I’ll just jot it down here.

I have learned a lot of people who want to sell me things, have settled into a habit of making the sale by comparing their product to someone else’s. They tell me their product does far better at the same job.

A lot of the time…most of the time…given the opportunity to prove themselves, these people fail. I find that to be a little curious, because one would think if these people were out-and-out lying, their claims would be verified through a process having to do with random chance. They would fail fifty percent of the time. But they fail, more like, I dunno…sixty…seventy…higher than that. Subconciously, over time, I have come to regard the experience of “Hey! It really does work better than the other guy!” as a narrow, epochal, exception to the rule, which over time almost never works out that way.

So I’m left to conclude the “My stuff is better than Brand X” is a harbinger for a failed experiment, should I be so inclined to provide the opportunity.

One of the tactics I see that seems to intensify the potential for failure, is something I have come to call the “Gonnadooz versus Havdunz” approach. It’s an indicator that the salesman is lying about the superiority of what he provides, and is acutely aware that his product is, in fact, inferior. It works like this. You pitch me something…you compare the service you provide to an equivalent service provided by the other guy. You talk about what the other guy does, you go on and on about the history of what he’s been doing, shining the light in the direction that accentuates the blemishes. That’s the “Havdunz.” And then you talk about what you will do. That’s the “Gonnadooz.”

You can’t point out the blemishes of a “Gonnadooz,” because there aren’t any yet. It’s like pointing out the warts of a ghost. It’s just an ethereal vision, nothing more. So it’s an unequal comparison. Prospective customers may be forgiven for overlooking the hobbling effect that this has on the comparison vehicle. But the salesman built that vehicle. He must know.

Sometime earlier this summer, I went to the Democratic National Committee website and told them I was a Democrat who was interested in getting Howard Dean’s updates. I have noticed the Chairman’s updates all use this tactic…religiously…as if Dr. Dean had someone in the room ready to stomp his testicles should he fail to work it in. Havdunz…what a boondoggle Iraq has been, and what Katrina was…versus Gonnadooz…the “Democrats have a vision of” stuff.

I particularly get a kick out of the vision for rooting out corruption. Great work there, Howard.

Anyway, the Democrats have something to sell. The way they act, they know what they’re selling, is inferior. At forty, I have come to learn when people have confidence in what they’re selling…or even if they don’t, if they suspect their own product is inferior to Brand X, but aren’t quite sure about it…they shy away from Gonnadooz versus Havdunz. This is a tactic used only by the guy who is selling snake oil, and knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this is what he’s selling.

So You Hate Blogs, Do You

What we call “blogging,” is nothing more than a medium of communication. There are people who hate it, and of all the misguided souls in our midst I have come to seriously doubt the existence of a more delusional character than the blog-hater.

Blog-haters are truly amazing people, gifted in the art of using truly amazing logic. It just bowls me over that they can even drum up enough brainwave activity and cohesive, organized thought to get dressed in the morning. I don’t get them. Even the ones engaged in a livelihood put lately at risk, or even in severe jeopardy, by “blogging”; I can understand their motives, but beyond that, I can’t figure ’em out, and I’m particularly mystified by their success at, simply, being. HOW do they work? Each one of them, beat millions of other sperm. How is this possible?

Cold Fury gives a great example of what I’m talking about. USA Today’s Bruce Kluger:

If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.

On Aug. 8, Connecticut businessman Ned Lamont defeated U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary, a triumph widely credited to the rah-rah racket produced by pro-Lamont armies stationed along the Internet.

Indeed, the bloggers had scored big. They had helped vault a local politician to national prominence and cemented the Iraq war as Issue No. 1 in the congressional elections. Not a bad day.

But their victory was short-lived. Even before the primary, Lieberman announced that, should he lose, he’d still run in November as an independent. This electoral chutzpah effectively rope-a-doped the bloggers and recharged the senator’s fabled Joe-mentum. Lieberman’s still the man to beat in the general election.

If this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America’s noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office.

Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer’s big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes’ distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie’s rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest.

To see life through this kind of fisheye lens, in which anyone who claims a class membership and wants to see something happen, represents that entire class in this desire, must result in taking in a picture that is unsettling at times. How does this make sense? It’s like saying, a telemarketer called me last night, I told him to fuck off (as I almost always do), so people who talk on the phone must be deeply unsettled at the rebuke I delivered to the telemarketer. What the hell??

Two factors at work here. One: This Kluger fellow perceives his livelihood to be threatened by bloggers. Two: He comes from a world in which, when you’re the protagonist and you want to see something happen, rarely does the occasion arise, nor should you expect it to, where you can use the two hands God gave you to make it happen. No, the only way you can make things happen, anytime, anywhere, is to take all the antagonists who have something to do with stopping it from happening, and write something to minimize them. That’s the only way anything gets done in the world inhabited by people like him.

And so he hates blogs…which makes no more sense than hating typewriters. To make them go away, he becomes a cheerleader-of-misery, rah-rah-ing away when the bloggers get something wrong — and, presumably, muzzling anybody who rah-rahs away if a “blogger” gets something right. Said muzzling, I would have to assume, to be executed by writing something to minimize the opposing-side cheerleader. It’s all just cheers and catcalls; somebody actually doing work, is a foreign concept.

And the bloggers threaten his industry, so they must die.

Oh, it’s all just so much speculation and conjecture. I’m trying to give him the benefit of every doubt. Because the only other theory up with which I can come, is that Kluger is wombat-rabies bollywonkers pigshit crazy.

Does he have a driver’s license?

Pull Pin, Walk Away

The words of the first Muslim Miss England seem, at first blush, to be an innocent re-interpretation of Rule #1 for Living With Me, which is, if I’m gonna be accused of something I wanna be guilty.

Hammasa Kohistani made history last year when she was chosen to represent England in the Miss World pageant.

But one year on, the 19-year-old student from Hounslow feels that winning the coveted beauty title last September was a “sugar coating” for Muslims who have become more alienated in the past 12 months.

She said: “The attitude towards Muslims has got worse over the year. Also the Muslims’ attitude to British people has got worse.

“Even moderate Muslims are turning to terrorism to prove themselves. They think they might as well support it because they are stereotyped anyway. It will take a long time for communities to start mixing in more.”

Yeah that makes perfect sense already, see. I’m a Muslim, and I don’t blow people up, see, nor do I support acts of terror. But those dirty little western people with their decadent lifestyles and their movies made by the filthy Jew, keep accusing me of supporting terrorism…I figure, what the fuck, I might as well. And so, I “turn to terrorism” according to her.

It’s just the only logical thing to do. Get discriminated against…turn to terrorism. Two Muslims face discrimination, one turns to terrorism and the other one doesn’t…what does Ms. Kohistani have to say about the one that does not? Which of the Muslims has something to learn from the other? It appears she isn’t even considering this. It’s like she’s saying terrorism is obligatory, once you are “stereotyped.” Even the moderate Muslims are doing it, after all.

Life gets complicated in a great big hurry for Ms. Kohistani when one starts to ponder the course of action to be engaged with this useful epiphany…if we stop stereotyping, will the moderate Muslims stop supporting terrorism?

“It is not for me to answer how to get people to turn away from terrorism. The politicians don’t know what to do and I am just a 19-year-old.”

I see, I see. In a life-and-death situation, we’re supposed to have faith in this adorable little psychoanalysis of passive supporters of terrorism…surely, sufficient thought must have gone into it, to ensure it’s an accurate reflection of what’s going on. Oopsie, though! Not enough thought has gone into it, to figure out what to do with it. That’s for somebody else. Cut her some slack, she’s only nineteen. But when she assigns blame, against the direction of common sense, don’t worry she knows exactly what she’s talking about there. She’s more an authority on who’s-at-fault, than Santa is on who’s-naughty-who’s-nice.

Just don’t ask her what to do…because, you see, that would require some responsibility being invested in the veracity of her theory.

This stupid girl is simply unaccustomed to a culture in which people are free to form their own opinions. You say stuff, and what you get to decide in such a culture is — the stuff you say. Nothing more. Just the gutteral sounds. People get to interpret that however they wish, which is where she’s having a tough time fitting in. She’s clearly expecting to distribute a message of “they who support terrorism are not at fault, the blame goes to those who notice them supporting terrorism” — and for people to actually pick up on that message. Exactly the way she wants them to. Why not? It’s what she wants, she’s the one speaking, and it’s not like people should be free to form their own thoughts about what she said. It doesn’t even seem to be occurring to her what a thoroughly miserable job she’s done of representing a) England b) Muslims c) the pageant d) nineteen-year-olds and e) pretty women.

Thanks to her incredibly ignorant comments, just speaking for myself, I’ve got a fresh impulse to get the voting age raised, throw some tea into Boston harbor, repeal womens’ suffrage and profile at the airports. Isn’t it ironic? That impulse is the natural result of the very logic she’s trying to use…except it doesn’t seem to occur to her, that the principle may have an effect on anyone besides the poor, oh-so-put-upon, “yeah we support terrorism but we have a great excuse for doing so” Muslims.

I guess if you’re a Muslim, you get to make decisions about what’s going on, and what to do about it…and if you’re not, you don’t.

What a dirty, racist little bitch.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… XVIII

Bullwinkle Blog makes a great point. I have nothing to add.

Bush Is Wrong About The Democrats.
Posted by: Bullwinkle in General on September 1, 2006 at 5:45 am

In Latest Push, Bush Cites Risk in Quitting Iraq

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 31 � President Bush said Thursday that withdrawing now from Iraq would leave Americans at risk of terrorist attacks “in the streets of our own cities,” and he cast the struggle against Islamic extremists as the costly but necessary successor to the battles of the last century against Nazism and Communism.
:
The speech, the first of five addresses on national security Mr. Bush plans to deliver between now and Sept. 19, was part of an orchestrated White House offensive to buttress public support for the Iraq war and portray Democrats as less capable of protecting the country, a theme that has proved effective for Republicans in the past two elections.

Even as Mr. Bush spoke, a series of explosions ripped through Baghdad, providing more images of a sort that he acknowledged have been “sometimes unsettling” to the public.

Democrats aren�t less capable of defending the US, just less willing. It�s all a matter of priorities and the only identifiable priority the Dems seem to have is to regain power. The end result of that happening would have them taking charge of the same military, same weapons, same infrastructure and same resources. That would leave them with the same capabilities we currently have to fight terrorism. The problem is that they won�t do it. [emphasis mine]

This isn’t an argument about what to do in Iraq; if it was that, the Democrats would be able to figure out what their plan was, and articulate it to the rest of us. No, it’s an argument about what should be of concern to everybody. Love the war or hate it, while it’s going on, it’s a little tough to get worked up about the issue of fleecing thirty-something apartment rats to pay for free Viagara for rich old people with summer homes.

It doesn’t matter what your political party is…people understand, down to the marrow in their bones, when dirty little men roam the planet wanting to blow us up, whatever nanny-state entitlement programs we have inextricably entangled into our constitutional government, is purely a moot issue. It’s something to be pondered when danger has passed…or, when we choose to remain ignorant of it. Democrats don’t want to retreat from the War on Terror, necessarily. What they want, is for us to simply stop talking about it, so the fecal-sandwich bake sale can start up again.

Shockingly Permissible

I see that Stop The ACLU has a decent write-up on this brain-damaged idea to put the assassination of President Bush into a movie.

No, I don’t call it a brain-damaged idea because I’m in favor of censorship. I’m in favor of free speech. Free speech, with very narrow common-sense exceptions, which don’t apply here.

I’m also in favor of pointing out when tiny little groups of people start to dictate what “everyone” else has to be thinking, and when they can get away with it and then cover it up. The message has gone out: You shouldn’t even talk about the President being assassinated, UNLESS, the President has oafish national security policies and mispronounces the word “nuclear” like that idiot President Bush…then it’s okay.

Two-thirds of a century ago, if the President used a wheelchair you weren’t allowed to take pictures. Now you can…uh…

It�s an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of work, a drama constructed like a documentary that looks back at the assassination of George Bush as the starting point for a very gripping detective story.

It�s a pointed political examination of what the War on Terror did to the American body politic.

Yeah right, what HE said.

Retard.

Cranial Fulmination

This was posted a whole week ago on The Nose On Your Face. Thank goodness for the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler or I’d never have found out about it.

Fox News personality Greta Van Sustern died from what doctors are calling a “cranial fulmination” yesterday after a cruel hoax went horribly wrong. A spokesman for Van Sustern explains.

“I received a phone call from what seemed to be a very nice couple last night who said they had a hot news tip,” explained On The Record producer Jason Teague. “They identified themselves as the Dover’s; Ben and Eileen. The story they told was so pure, so wonderful that I should have seen it as a hoax. When I told Greta the details she began to tremble, her eyes opened very wide and she whispered ‘Oh dear lord. The prophecy has come true.’ Then she was… she was… gone.”

No, no, Van Susteren is still around. It’s a j-j-j-JOKE. Click…read…

On the Blah, Blah, Blah

Item!

I live in Sacramento. Due to certain events in my personal life this year, during the period from about Christmas to right about now, I have not gotten out much. I live about a mile from work, so I get to see developments on the road within that mile on a daily basis. I have to pick up my boy and drop him off again, so I get to supervise events on the freeway and backroads within, oh, twenty miles — about weekly. Outside of that, my motoring has been entirely occasional.

Which, I think, puts me in a great position to comment on trends. So, on the chattering away on cell phones by my fellow motorists: From my perspective, within the Big Tomato, it has been on a rise I can only fairly call meteoric. I would say three years ago it was one out of ten drivers, two years ago it was two out of ten, last year it was three out of ten, now it’s nearly half of them. Chatting away, 75 miles an hour, maybe 85, maybe more, blah, blah, blah.

Item!

I have gotten really pissy about drivers texting away, not necessarily blabbing away, behind the wheel. Although I’ve done it, plenty of times. It’s one of those things that is so wrong, it doesn’t matter if I’ve done it or not. But while maintaining my laser-like focus on the subject at hand, as any decent writer does, I allowed myself to wander down a bunny trail…

One more thing. When time and space permit, I’d like to expound on my little rant about talking on cell phones, without the benefit of hands-free devices.

We have studies that say when you talk on a hands-free device, your level of distraction is on par with what you’d be experiencing if you held the cell phone up to your face. Those studies are bullshit, you hear me? I live in the Big Tomato. I see people talking on their cell phones all the time — not-hands-free. Up to their faces.

It is…let me stress this properly…it is PHYSICALLY FREAKIN’ IMPOSSIBLE to do a check to your blind spot, before a lane change, while talking on a cell phone, without being completely absolutely no-mistakingly obvious that you’re doing a head-check. It is a deeply conspicuous movement you have to do. Those fuckers are not doing it, I guaran-damn-tee you. It is up to everybody else to get the hell out of their way, they know not what the hell they’re doing. I can personally vouch for this, swearing an oath to that effect, just by watching them. They are glancing in their passing mirrors — if they’re even doing that — and then breezily just sliding on over. Hope you’re not there when they do.

Item!

The Sacramento state assembly has passed a bill that would impose a $50 fine on drivers caught blah, blah, blah-ing away on their cell phones behind the wheel.

Item!

The morning guys on the radio, who — deeply distrust liberals, but aren’t all about promoting Republicans, just want to find the common-sense solution, and on the way do as decent a job as they can spotting the crooks, liars and charlatans and talking-point-peddlers — thereby ending up agreeing with me a whole lot of the time — blasted the bill, which, by the way, has my whole-hearted support. Their position is that anyone who believes hands-free devices make your phone conversation safer, such as myself, is being duped by a bunch of crooks. My position is that he who believes hands-free devices don’t make the conversation safe, is the one getting duped by a bunch of crooks.

Item!

The guys and I had a brief water-cooler conversation about this yesterday, following the radio program…the following points came up.

So anyhoo…we live in the Age of Google. I don’t have to speculate on this stuff. I don’t have to form my prejudices on extremely short-sighted and under-informed opinions like some guy living a hundred years ago. I’m a twenty-first century search-engine-literate man. I can draw upon a tiny sampling of items, and form my short-sighted and under-informed prejudices based on those.

So let’s get to it.

Actually, I wasn’t too surprised by what I found. Let’s take the biggest group first…I found, in reverse chronological order, this and this and this and this and this. Just what was promised; “lots of studies,” maybe even, “all the studies.” One problem: The same names keep popping up. Frank Drews. David Strayer. William Johnson. Human Events.

This creates two issues. Issue One, whether the effort is deliberate or not, the public is being programmed. It isn’t hard to find people who consider themselves to be well-educated on this issue, willing to chirp up — even taking the initiative to chirp up — and chime in with that “independent” thought, “all the studies say talking on a headset is just as distracting as holding the cell up to your face.” Well, it really isn’t “all” the studies…although to be fair to Drs. Drews, Strayer and Johnson, and Human Events, there are some other studies saying the same thing like this one and this one. So I’m not going to go so far and say “Aha! It’s just Dr. Drews, Strayer and Johnson, and Human Events, nobody else has studies saying that!” because that would not be true.

The point stands nevertheless. Unanimity amongst the “studies,” as is often the case, turns out to be purely an illusion. Those three are, intentionally or not, “flooding” the study pool. Note the timeframe. They went on a tear in 2003, again in 2004, again in June of this year, and again just now.

Which brings us to Issue Two. Why do Drs. Drews, Strayer, Johnson, and Human Events keep doing this? It really doesn’t matter what their financial ties are, when you think about it. Something is motivating them to do this. They have a bug of some kind up their collective butts, and they like to do “studies” that find a certain conclusion. Well, studies aren’t supposed to be doing that; studies are supposed to find whatever conclusion the data will tell the studies to find. Could Drs. Drew, Strayer and/or Johnson set out on one of their studies, gather the data, and, looking over it to find the patterns in the most scientific, objective, unbiased way possible — come to learn something contrary to their own biases? If so, would the conclusion make it into print? Let’s just say I have my doubts.

That you can go the other way — gather the data, look it over with a bias toward saying the opposite, and, whether influenced by the bias or not, post a conclusion compatible with that bias — has been proven. Plantronics, which makes bluetooth headsets much like the Cardo unit I use, has financial ties to yet another study two years ago that said the exact opposite.

A new study finds that drivers’ reaction time, accuracy and consistency of speed improved significantly when they used a headset with their cell phone, compared with using a handheld phone.

The study is one of the few to analyze physical impairment experienced while driving and using a mobile phone; to date most other studies have focused solely on the mental distraction of using a mobile phone while driving.

The study was commissioned by Plantronics, which manufactures headsets. It was conducted by Design Science, an independent human factors research firm that has conducted other driving-related studies for a wide range of organizations including the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Now this blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is named after a library administrator who figured out the size of the earth before the Time of Christ, by peeking into holes in the ground. We’re all about ignoring studies…or, at least, subordinating the studies to our own observations, when studies and our observations run in directly opposite directions. And our observation is this:

People who do lane changes to the left, when they talk on cell phones held up to their left ears, do not check their blind spots. They simply don’t. It’s provable. And it’s asserted pretty substantially, to the point you could bet serious money on it with high confidence, they’re not even checking their passing mirrors.

They just move over.

It’s easily observed. It’s proven. If a study says otherwise, the study is wrong. If these chuckleheads were learning as much about their blind spots while talking on their cell phones, as well as I learn about my own blind spot when I’m on a hands-free device, their body motions would be so incredibly awkward, and so easily observed, there would be no mistaking it…and they’d probably be imposing a wholly different traffic hazard just going through that snaky body motion. It borders on the physically impossible. And to do the proper head check without me being able to see you’re doing it, protrudes well into that neighborhood of impossibility. It simply cannot be done.

And like I said the other day, those fuckers are not checking their blind spots, they’re just moving over without looking.

This is about 99% of the folks talking on cell phones without the benefit of a hands-free device. And forty percent of the folks on the road, give or take, are doing exactly that. It’s scary, scary stuff.

I’m pretty big on the libertarian, freedom-from-tyranny angle. I’m one of the “Where does it talk about fire halls in the Constitution, huh?” kinds of guys. But I know of no constitutional provision, state or federal, direct or implied, that calls up a problem with a state regulation against phone use while driving.

And, much as I hate to use those four words heralding the arrival of the nanny state, the four words do apply…the time has come.

But it should be noted, we have been here before.

Update 9/1/06: Flashback to this great piece of faux-sexist humor from Car & Driver that was brought to my attention back in May.

This morning on I-95, I looked over to my left and there was a woman in a brand new Cadillac doing 65 mph with her face up next to her rear view mirror putting on her eyeliner.

I looked away for a couple seconds and when I looked back she was halfway over in my lane, still working on that makeup.

As a man, I don’t scare easily. But she scared me so much; I dropped my electric shaver, which knocked the donut out of my other hand.

In all the confusion of trying to straighten out the car using my knees against the steering wheel, it knocked my cell phone away from my ear, which fell into the coffee between my legs, splashed and burned Big Jim and the Twins, ruined the damn phone, soaked my trousers and disconnected an important call.

Damn women drivers!

Memo For File XXIII

This is about knots…with an emphasis on useful stuff you need to know for sailing…

This Is Good XX

This is the paradox to writing about politics, and to writing in general as well, I think. You create something thoroughly enjoyable, and when you do, much of the time you narrow down the audience. To create material that re-opens the potential audience, oftentimes you have to water down the quality of said material.

Our blogger pal Good Lieutenant at Mein Blogovault has a hilarious post up that mirrors what he wrote for the Jawa Report. It summarizes the whole utterly ridiculous Plamegate affair for the benefit of…well, I’m afraid, for the benefit of those who are such die-hard political junkies that they don’t need to be told what happened. So as a practical matter, the audience has been narrowed down to something needle-thin. But for entertainment value, you should head on over and take a look…

…Joe Wilson is a liar and a hack. Valerie Plame is a super-secret media whore. Rove is a non-factor. Novak was doing his job. Russert is silent. Mitchell is silent. Bush is vindicated. Cheney is off the non-hook. Keith Olbermann is a jackass. Chris Matthews is in catatonic depression. Mark Ash and Jason Leopold are on suicide watch….

The whole thing reads just like that.

Comedy GOLD, Lieutenant. Your temporary field promotion to Captain is in the mail.

Now, some nice folks out there might not be political “junkies,” like I guess I am since I understood every word of the Lieutenant’s manifesto, and was laughing my ass off about it. Other folks might, similarly, understand all of it, but might have friends and family who would not. So for those who need a “primer” on this utterly ludicrous scandal-that-never-wuz, I submit this primer put together by Christopher Hitchens. Chock full of good protein, but easily digested.

In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary, it was he who approached sources within the administration and the CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq has�like Robert Novak’s�long been a byword in Washington. It is particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the journalists�Michael Isikoff and David Corn�who did the most to get the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long beyond the span of its natural life.

Have fun. Just don’t expect the labors of your reading to actually conclude in anything of substance. Part of the reason that the summary of this whole thing is noteworthy, is, that the substance leading to that summary, is anything but.

I guess that’s politics for ya. We keep on assuming everything will make sense in the end. From where do we get that notion? We’re constantly left asking ourselves this…and the next thing that pops up, we go right back to assuming it again.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form XV

Thing I Know #138 is: It’s very difficult to acquire good judgment without experience. It’s very difficult to acquire experience without bad judgment.

Now, I don’t know if Dr. Thomas Sowell reads my blog. I would suspect hardly anybody does. But how, then, do you explain this gem which appeared within the good doctor’s “random thoughts” yesterday on Townhall.

Someone said that good judgment comes from experience — which in turn comes from bad judgment.

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered…besides of which, I can’t claim credit for inventing this in the first place. All I can claim to have done, is to have personally verified there’s a lot of truth in it, and I suspect many others can make the same claim.

But now we’re settling into a pattern of suspecting, with no small amount of self-deprecating humor, that perhaps Doctor Sowell is among the “nobodies” who never read my blog. Eh, perhaps it’s a remote possibility, but it’s fun to think about. And in all seriousness, it would be a high honor if it were true.

We’re All Such Independent Thinkers

Everybody wants to be an independent thinker, it seems. So many people appear to think it’s easy. Well, it isn’t. Being an independent thinker takes a lot of — and you could never guess this if you were not experienced with it — humility. That’s because everyone has what it takes to digest a talking point, regurgitate it without fact-checking it, and believe against the evidence that they’ve mulled it over. You have to learn from experience to be an independent thinker. You have to admit when you’ve been duped.

And the sad fact is, most people don’t do this. Most people haven’t even spent time in an environment where they can be duped…and, subsequently, be placed in a situation where they’ll be forced to admit that’s what happened. Most people are cloistered within happy lifestyles in which they can be duped, blissfully, six different ways before breakfast, and never become aware of it.

I can prove this easily.

A society chock full of critical thinkers…we wouldn’t have, or tolerate, anniversaries of terrible events like Hurricane Katrina. What in the BLUEFUGG is the point of an anniversary? It is nothing more than a commandment from a layer of elites way-on-high, down to the dirty-unwashed commoners, to spend lots of time thinking about a certain thing, masquerading beneath a costume of “news.”

It’s a year after Katrina. How does this affect you? Maybe pretty drastically — if you happen to be living one year ago. But you’re not. You’re here. You’re now. The hurricane isn’t happening. This is not news; it simply isn’t.

Now, how many “Katrina, One Year Later” stories have you seen this week? On the boob tube? On the “innernets”? On the radio? In newspapers? In magazines? It’s freakin’ everywhere. Those in the news, really aren’t doing an adequate job of talking about anything else. Nothing else going on? Come on, now, you can’t seriously say that. Compared to the one-year anniversary of something that happened a year ago and isn’t happening now, we got a lot of stuff going on that, quite simply, is more important.

Ah, but anniversaries affect how people feel. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. The oh-so-unbiased and oh-so-objective editors who have no political axe to grind whatsoever, are simply being sensitive and responsive to the way people feel on the first anniversary of a hurricane that’s not around anymore.

Okay, let’s go for that.

In less than six months, we’re going to have the sixty-fifth anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066 in which thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned in violation of their constitutional rights.

Gee, that should arouse some pretty spicy feelings, right? Especially now, in this day & age wherein President Bush is oppressing the civil liberties of American citizens by signing executive orders authorizing their intern…

Whoops, that’s right, I forgot. He’s not doing that. Nothing close to it.

Yeah, but I’ll bet he’s going to do it any day now! The Founding Fathers wanted us to be deeply suspicious of our government doing stuff like that, waking up every single morning expecting our government to encroach on our civil liberties, regardless of what a wonderful job the government did vindicating itself the day before. Right?

Right. That’s the essence of a patriotic attitude here in America.

So…a 65th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 would be pretty constructive. And patriotic. What a useful reminder that would be, of where we might be going.

Maybe even a useful reminder, for those who care to observe it, of the decent job the current administration has done balancing security against liberty — when viewed against the backdrop of history, and previous presidents who executed a far clumsier, and downright inferior job, of this delicate task.

And we’re big into the “lessons learned” thing, which is why we’re having a Katrina Plus One media orgy in the first place. That is what it’s all about. Right? Right?

So…bring on that 65th anniversary. I’m sure it’s coming. The letters G-O-O-G-L-E will be tastefully wrapped in barbed wire when you go to the search engine’s main page. Time Magazine will have a splash cover with a sinister looking FDR looking down into the camera, with the smoke from his jauntily-angled cigarette swirling maliciously in the air around him, while in the foreground a pathetic little Japanese kid peeks out from behind a fence. Editorial cartoons will pockmark the newspapers, all about this terrible thing Roosevelt did 65 years ago. Perhaps a special-issue dime will come out in 2007, with Roosevelt’s face taken off the heads-side and big letters that say “WE ARE SORRY” stamped in his place. Maybe we’ll even have a movie or two.

No…no, I don’t think so. Let’s step back in the real world for a second here. It’s not happening. That isn’t what “anniversaries” are all about. They are simply cogs carefully installed in the machinery to spin a certain way, mesh a certain way, and control what the dirty little people think about things, according to what the watchmaker has in mind.

The anniversary is just one device among money in the mystic’s toolbelt. Think on this. How many times a year are we told “everybody” is concerned about something? And what machinery do we have in place, to lift such sentiments, accurately, from the bedrock social strata that really is “everybody”? We are given messages like this constantly. Multiple times weekly, let alone annually. And on what “everybody” is really thinking, we don’t know a tenth of a percent about anything. Nor, when you think about it for a while, should you really even care.

But in a democratic society, big, important people have a great deal invested in what “everybody” is thinking. Or…what “everybody” can be fooled into thinking that “everybody” else is thinking.

And so we have anniversaries of things. That is all they are supposed to be, and that is all they are.

Must-Tards IX

Annie Althouse has earned my respect. However, on this one…well, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree.

Yahoo News reports that Matt Stone — one of the two “South Park” creators — says that marines guarding Saddam Hussein have forced him to watch their movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” which depicts Saddam in hell having a sexual relationship with Satan.
:
Let me add that I love the movie. And I’ve always assumed the Saddam watched the movie himself on his own in the days before we invaded.

But showing it to him now is just an attempt to annoy and humiliate him. We should be above that. [emphasis mine]

It’s not that I out-and-out disagree…but I am just so gawdawful tired of that threadbare cliche. This country really isn’t “above” nuthin’, and I’ve gotten a little bit jaundiced about the idea of supposing that we “should” be “above” such things.

There is something “humiliating” about being the only entity involved in a conflict of any kind among several disparate entities, who is called upon to follow certain rules the other parties are not being called upon to follow. Now, it is true that you can embrace a certain kind of nobility by lashing yourself to a shorter leash in some situations, and inspiring your counterparts to rise to your level. Some situatoins are like that. This one is not.

There are people who hate us. And if we follow certain rules of civility and decorum and non-humiliation…guess what? They’ll keep hating us. If we put on pink tutus, they’ll keep hating us. If we bring the prisoners at gitmo a nice chocolate cupcake for breakfast every day, they’ll keep hating us. If we change the Pledge of Allegiance to “One Nation Under Allah” they’ll keep hating us.

Get my drift? It don’t matter. So…what in the hell is the point?

Anytime you use the word “should,” you should be able to define what happens if the “should” isn’t done. That remains true for all “should” sentences, including the foregoing. So, let me just say, when you start “should”-ing people to death and “must”-ing people to death, you raise the question — what happens if we don’t do what you want? And in this exercise, Prof. Althouse fails to articulate what happens if we continue to humiliate Hussein (assuming we’re doing that).

And failing to articulate that, she’s denigrated herself into simply being an unthinking mouthpiece. A mouthpiece brilliant in other areas, maybe, but a mouthpiece nonetheless. We make Saddam Hussein watch a movie…or we don’t. As a practical matter, it makes no difference one way or t’other.

Dr. Melissa Clouthier, another female whose intellect I admire (yes, they’re out there), addresses this with a handy quote from one “Sam”:

Cripes. I can’t imagine a moral universe where law professors defend the imprisoned Saddam Hussein from teasing that pales in comparison to that routinely absorbed by fat twelve-year-olds.

Actually, having his dignity defended by sissy moralists must be as least as humililiating as a South Park episode. Stop it, Ann. Your motherly coddling of Saddam cruelly mocks his swarthy manliness. Have you no decency?

Eh, I say we cut Professor Althouse some slack here. She’s probably having an off-day. Other than that, I stand with Sam.

Teasing. For a mass-murderer. Who gives a rat’s ass.

On Karr

Thanks to Boortz, we have a theory about John Mark Karr. A theory that actually makes some sense. Well…some sense. More than any other I’ve heard so far.

Here’s Mark Karr in Thailand. He’s just been fired from a teaching job. Perhaps he feared that he was facing charges in Thailand involving his sexual obsession with children. How hard is it to figure out that you would much rather face misdemeanor charges in California than who-knows-how-many years in a Thai jail? So …. confess to JonBenet’s murder, get a taxpayer-funded ride back to the U.S. while sipping on champagne and gobbling prawns, then give up the DNA sample, watch the case fall apart, and head to California to face your misdemeanor charge. Plus .. he gets all the publicity and fame he so badly wanted! He was even talking about Johnny Depp playing him in a movie!

I find it to be really sad, and at the same time somewhat comical, that Occam’s Razor says this is the real deal. All other theories involve entities multiplied beyond their necessity. This one defines the baseline necessity. Well, so far.

So far.

Why We Don’t Believe You

Via blogger friend Buck Pennington of Exile in Portales, I come to find out about this excellent essay by Mary Katharine Ham called “Why We Don’t Believe You.” Chock full of lean, fresh meat…critiquing some stuff from the mainstream media that is supposed to be lean fresh meat, but is mostly crap. They’ve been called on this stuff already, but Ms. Ham does a better job than most. Good find, Buck.

A Poll I’d Like To See II

Back in May, I came up with a poll I’d like to see. Now, I don’t know why none of the poll-makers, not even one, have taken the hint and put out an actual poll with some of my questions on it. The polls we do see just ask the same questions over and over again, and most of those have to do with the approval ratings of some guy who’s going to stop being President in about 28 months. The irrelevance is striking, but the lack of creativity is even moreso. So it seems, to me, the pollsters would have done well to steal a few of my questions for their polls, just to keep the polls fresh and fun, if for no other reason. But I don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs.

Well it seems every time former President Jimmy Carter opens his mouth, not that I have long to wait for that to happen — he gives me more ideas for a poll I’d like to see. Now in all fairness to Jimmy, you do realize, don’t you, that he’s quite a long way from whistling in the wilderness on this stuff right? We have a lot of people who think his points about President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are right on the money. So far as I can tell, all of these people, or nearly all of them, were born sometime after we fired Carter because we couldn’t stand his policies anymore. But they’re old enough to vote now. Yeah, that’s how old you and I are, if you can remember what a terrible President he was.

Here’s something even more impressive: I have yet to hear — once! — a statement to the effect of “Former President Carter is right and the current administration needs to listen to him, because if we don’t do as he says, we have no hope of achieving the wonderful results Jimmy Carter did like for example…” I haven’t heard that one time yet. Not even in reference to the Camp David accords.

Yet Carter blabs away about what he doesn’t like. Toward what end, nobody knows; even his most ardent fans, seem unable to articulate what goals are to be reached, if we expunge our national policies of all that is offensive to him.

So here is a poll I’d like to see.

It would be more useful than handicapping a President who is going to have the same status as Jimmy Carter 875 days from now, I think. A lot more useful.

I mean, hey, one man’s opinion is just as legitimate as any other’s. But sometimes the nose-counts say something important about what’s going on in our society. It seems to me that question would highlight something going on. I’d really like to know how the percentages stack up. My interest in that question wouldn’t be to influence what’s happening — at least, not completely. I’d really like to see how it shakes out.

What else, what else…well, let’s take a look at some of the things Mr. Carter had to say.

“We’ve never before had an administration that would endorse pre-emptive war – that is a basic policy of going to war against another country even though our own security was not directly threatened,” he said. In his book, President Carter writes: “I have been sorely tempted to launch a military attack on foreigners.” But had he still been president, he says that he would never have considered invading Iraq in 2003.
:
Asked why he thinks Mr Blair has behaved in the way that he has with President Bush’s belligerent regime, Mr Carter said he could only put it down to timidity.

That’s worthy of a poll question right there. Timidity…drives a coalition of nations to launch an attack against a filthy butcher like Saddam. Presumably, if you’ve got some real ballz, you leave the mofo right where he is so he can keep on stirring up trouble, but at least you can brag about having stood up to the big bad George W. Bush.

You know, it occurs to me that if people think the current American “regime” is a “belligerent” one, and most pointedly in comparison to Hussein’s old regime, they can jolly well come out and say so. A lot of people appear to be anxious to do exactly that. But they never quite get around to doing it, nor are they called upon to say that. Let’s have a poll question that asks.

Again, I really wanna know. How many people who call themselves Americans would pick d? I mean, really?

And there’s more fresh meat up at the top of the article. Let’s see a poll on this one.

Tony Blair’s lack of leadership and timid subservience to George W Bush lie behind the ongoing crisis in Iraq and the worldwide threat of terrorism, according to the former American president Jimmy Carter.

I mean, I’m trying to give these questions a humorous spin, but when you stop and think about them for a second or two they are deadpan, flat-ass, heart-attack serious questions.

Some folks have deadpan flat-ass heart-attack serious opinions about the answers. But I can’t help noticing, among those, the folks sympathetic to former President Carter’s point-of-view, only advance those answers in settings where there is a social benefit to be realized from doing so. Protest rallies. Move-On-Dot-Org block parties. Left-wing political conventions. I’d like to see them answer a poll, with some of the ideas they have…and then, I’d like to see the poll tabulated.

There is a reason why I want to see this. From my perspective, when Former President Carter opens his big ol’ cakehole, the newsworthiness of the cakehole-opening event is completely invested in the question of how many people agree with him. What Former President Carter thinks…is something I already know. How well it works when it’s translated into policy…I know that too, and I have no desire to see it again. Whether or not we want more of that policy…that was decided in the fall of 1980.

I think that question is the most serious one, right there. And it is pivotal in determining the relevance of Carter’s remarks. If a majority don’t pick d, then he is just one more cantankerous curmudgeon who won’t shut the hell up. Nothing more. Kind of on par with some guy writing posts for The Blog That Nobody Reads…except unlike Carter, I haven’t been fired after my one-term as President quite yet.

I want to know: For how many of my countrymen does this bitter old fart speak?

Isn’t that what we all want to know?

No DWTM

I don’t text message behind the wheel anymore. It used to be, the whole thing made a lot of sense. I text messaged with T9 on a Seimens S46, which, also, seemed to make a lot of sense. Letters made into words. Cool. And then I upgraded to a Treo 650, and text messaging behind the wheel made even more sense. No need to double-check stuff. Except I was double-checking anyway.

A couple of times I got done sending stuff, looked back up out my windshield and thought to myself, “would I be prepared for whatever I saw here, no matter what it was?” And I had to admit, the answer was: Maybe not. And so I’d reign my bad habits back in, which is what “good” drivers do. You dance on the edge, when you make a habit of dancing further out, from time to time you should make it a point to dance further in, too. Push the envelope now-and-then…not constantly.

But then, of course, I’d get cocky again.

And I’d think to myself, you know, in my lifetime, I’ve never made it a habit of getting cockier and cockier, without disaster following. This is the one exception. How long will it stay an exception?

But, I didn’t think too much of it…until disaster happened. NOT to me, thank goodness.

And I’m so glad both of the folks involved appeared to be walking around just fine. Must’ve been a wake-up call for me. Lady in front of me, crashed into the guy two cars ahead of me. She: 50 m.p.h. Him: Zero. Yeeesh. They must have had air bags.

Here’s my whole deal. You may opt in to being her — if, and only if, you want to keep on DWTM. Driving While Text Messaging. But to be him, you don’t have to do squat. Just drive. Get into a congested situation, a parking lot, which, if you live in a major metropolis that just involves driving to work every morning.

I know from experience that my logic can sway people, but my written words, in conveying that logic, oftentimes fall short of doing this. So let’s just link to this story to help illustrate the gravity of the situation.

Allen Park Officer Hit In Crash Caused By Text-Messaging Driver
POSTED: 9:57 am EDT August 28, 2006

A suburban Detroit police officer was injured in an accident caused by a teenage motorist sending a text message on his cell phone.

Michigan State Police said a 17-year-old male driver hit the rear of an Allen Park police car, which was policing an earlier crash Sunday afternoon.

The crash caused the police car to spin around and hit the officer, who was thrown into the air on an Interstate 94 ramp.

One more thing. When time and space permit, I’d like to expound on my little rant about talking on cell phones, without the benefit of hands-free devices.

We have studies that say when you talk on a hands-free device, your level of distraction is on par with what you’d be experiencing if you held the cell phone up to your face. Those studies are bullshit, you hear me? I live in the Big Tomato. I see people talking on their cell phones all the time — not-hands-free. Up to their faces.

It is…let me stress this properly…it is PHYSICALLY FREAKIN’ IMPOSSIBLE to do a check to your blind spot, before a lane change, while talking on a cell phone, without being completely absolutely no-mistakingly obvious that you’re doing a head-check. It is a deeply conspicuous movement you have to do. Those fuckers are not doing it, I guaran-damn-tee you. It is up to everybody else to get the hell out of their way, they know not what the hell they’re doing. I can personally vouch for this, swearing an oath to that effect, just by watching them. They are glancing in their passing mirrors — if they’re even doing that — and then breezily just sliding on over. Hope you’re not there when they do.

I loathe nanny-state rules. I really, really do. I’m kind of iffy about motorcycle-helmet laws. But we absolutely, positively, need those two. No text messaging, and no talking on it without a hands-free.

We’ve run out of excuses for not having such laws. What does a hands free device cost now? Fifteen bucks? And are there really any cell phones that can’t accommodate them?

Memo For File XXII

One of the planks in the Democrats’ “Six for ’06” platform is to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission. Howard Dean keeps mentioning this to me in his e-mails that begin with “Dear Fellow Democrat.”

You might be wondering what the recommendations are. You might be wondering how many of them there are. Especially if you’re a Democrat. Speaking just for myself, I’ve long been wondering why Democrats don’t seem to care what exactly it is they say they want done. They’re supposed to be incredibly angry that it isn’t being done, and yet, very few of them know this item is in the platform, let alone being able to rattle off a few 9/11 commission recommendations that have not yet been done. So why so testy?

Here’s a link…

This Is Good XIX

Not everybody will find this outrageously funny. Only those among us who have lost work to a computer freezing up…ever…over, let’s say, the last twenty-five years.

Everybody else will be clueless about the humor.

My reasons for lacking any sympathy for Mr. Gates, whatsoever, have very little to do with computers. I hope he felt as uncomfortable as he looked.

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… III

Via Caerdroia, via Instapundit, via Ace, via the notorious Huffington Post…let us allow the words of Russell Shaw to speak for themselves. Heavily edited for brevity, but the conscious sentiment is being left unchanged, I think all would agree.

I hope and pray we don’t get hit again, like we did on September 11. Even one life lost to the violence of terrorism is too much.

If I somehow knew an attack was coming, I wouldn’t pause for a second to report it in order to prevent it from occuring.

But on the other hand, I remind myself that…If the Nazis had prevailed, tens, if not hundreds of millions more would have been killed.

That realization has led my brain to launch a political calculus 180 degrees removed from my pacifist-inclined leanings…What if another terror attack just before this fall’s elections could save many thousand-times the lives lost?
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If an attack occurred just before the elections, I have to think that at least a few of the voters who persist in this “Bush has kept us safe” thinking would realize the fallacy they have been under.

If 5% of the “he’s kept us safe” revise their thinking enough to vote Democrat, well, then, the Dems could recapture the House and the Senate and be in a position to:

Block the next Supreme Court appointment, one which would surely result in the overturning of Roe and the death of hundreds if not thousands of women from abortion-prohibiting states at the hands of back-alley abortionists;

Be in a position to elevate the party’s chances for a regime change in 2008. A regime change that would:

Save hundreds of thousands of American lives by enacting universal health care;

Save untold numbers of lives by pushing for cleaner air standards that would greatly reduce heart and lung diseases;

More enthusiastically address the need for mass transit, the greater availability of which would surely cut highway deaths;

Enact meaningful gun control legislation that would reduce crime and cut fatalities by thousands a year;

Fund stem cell research that could result in cures saving millions of lives;

Boost the minimum wage, helping to cut down on poverty which helps spawn violent crime and the deaths that spring from those acts;

Be less inclined to launch foolish wars, absence of which would save thousands of soldiers’ lives- and quite likely moderate the likelihood of further terror acts.
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If you knew us getting hit again would launch a chain of transformative, cascading events that would enable a better nation where millions who would have died will live longer, would such a calculus have any moral validity?

Any at all?

I didn’t know raising the minimum wage and supporting mass transit had anything to do with preventing deaths. I wonder how many pro-minimum-wage pro-mass-transit people feel that way.

Now this other stuff might be thought of as life-saving stuff, I imagine, at least in the minds of Mr. Shaw’s peers who support them. Abortion laws leading to saving the lives of women who would otherwise turn to illegal, back-alley abortions…pretty far-fetched, but I’ve heard it before. Cleaner air preventing deaths…that’s been said outright, and might have more favorable treatment from the facts available, than any of his other theories.

But like Vito Corleone said in the first scene out of The Godfather: Let’s be frank here. Liberal policies aren’t about saving lives. Liberal policies represent a means unto their own end. Liberal policies are all about liberal policies. They’re all about that smug sense of satisfaction liberals feel when everything is done their way.

This is easily proven through an exercise of, simply, getting down to “brass tacks” and looking at the commonality amongst the liberal policies. Letting gays into the military doesn’t have an awful lot to do with getting more babies aborted, does it? No, it doesn’t. And what does universal health care have to do with making it illegal to hire someone for less than seven bones an hour? Nothing. Even in the minds of the liberals who support such policies, there is no common theme.

It’s just a big ol’ mish-mash of baby-killing soldier-spitting Heather-has-two-mommies poor-schoolteacher-retaining job-outlawing segregationist anti-semitist ponytail-waving dictator-appeasing progressive-taxing Birkenstock-wearing Clarence-Thomas-bashing mediocrity-promoting liberal goodness.

I wonder how many progressives are represented by this guy. He’s on a path to self-delusion, clearly, if he thinks banning certain types of jobs leads to saving lives. And his delusion stretches to the extent that in his mind, maybe another 9/11-type attack would end up saving more lives than it would at first cost — IF such an attack would lead to that hated George W. Bush and his cronies being tossed out of power, so the big ol’ baby-killing job-outlawing mishmash can be installed.

So there is a faction of progressives, I infer, evaluating the “cost-benefit” of another 9/11 attack. And concluding the evaluation, they’re leaning toward the benefits outweighing the costs.

How big is the faction? Who knows. Who’s to say. It’s probably not inclusive of “all” liberals. Probably not. But we know it’s there. We know it; it’s an established fact.

One of the liberal causes is to invent new rights for terrorists. Invest in those terrorists, the rights our Constitution affords to American citizens, even in cases where the terrorists are clearly not American citizens.

Liberals want to give terrorists legal rights in court, that the terrorists don’t even have. And they want another 9/11 style attack, because they figure the political benefits of such an attack, for them, would be worth the death toll.

Hmm.

Am I reading something into that, that I shouldn’t? All who think so, tell me so; support the thesis with a proof. Can’t wait to see it. Can’t wait.

Intergenerational!

Now, THIS is scary.

We got inter-generational blogging goin’ on. This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, is partnered up by blood with this other blog over here.

Who’s the father? Who’s the son? Choose carefully…

What Is This, Sir?

Time-sensitive responsibilities preclude me from adding anything to this, but it isn’t necessary for me to do so. Have a great Friday, everybody.

Man Charged After Telling Chicago Airport Security His Penis Pump Was a Bomb
Wednesday, August 23, 2006

CHICAGO � Prosecutors say a 29-year-old man traveling with his mother desperately did not want her to know he had packed a sexual aid for their trip to Turkey.

So he told security it was a bomb, officials said.

Madin Azad Amin was stopped by officials on Aug. 16 after guards found an object in his baggage that resembled a grenade, prosecutors said.

When officers asked him to identify it, Amin said it was a bomb, said Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Lorraine Scaduto.

He later told officials he lied about the item because his mother was nearby and he did not want her to hear that it was part of a penis pump, Scaduto said.

Amin has been charged with felony disorderly conduct, said Andrew Conklin, a spokesman with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

Amin faces up to three years in prison if convicted.

Guy on the radio has some kind of a report that says the guy just kind of mumbled “pump,” the way you would, I guess, when your mother is standing nearby; and the guard misunderstood. Whatever.

Air Marshals Dress However They Want

In a sane world, this would be one of President Bush’s biggest weaknesses, and would have been ever since 2001.

Air marshals were told Thursday they will be allowed to dress the way they want and choose their own hotels in order to protect their anonymity while on missions.

Federal Air Marshal Service chief Dana Brown, who has been in the job for five months, said he was changing the rules, starting Sept. 1, after listening to air marshals’ concerns.

In a memo to the air marshals, Brown said the dress code was changed to “allow you to blend in and not direct attention to yourself, as well as be sufficiently functional to enable you to conduct your law enforcement responsibilities.”

Air marshals had complained that Brown’s predecessor, Thomas Quinn, insisted on a too-formal dress code that allowed people to pick them out. The marshals said, for example, that being forced to wear a jacket and collared shirt made them stand out on flights to Hawaii.

Not sure what the argument is, going in the other direction. I’ve read things about it, here and there. I’m just too lazy to go out and find those quotes at the moment. Not worth my time. They’re all stupid.

I’m expecting more; I’m expecting an attitude of “if you do something to thwart what terrorists’ plans, or plans that may be potentially made by terrorists, we will do anything and everything to protect you and what you do.” An attitude like that going all the way up to the Oval Office. The kind of attitude, from Republicans, that benefits unborn babies and baby-like constructs, i.e., stem cell lines. The kind of attitude, from Democrats, that benefits union goons, and piss-poor schoolteachers. The kind of attitude that says, “if everybody else likes it, but it has only a marginal chance of getting in your way, we will oppose it with every fiber of our being because we think your mission is so important.” That; not this “we support the troops but oppose their mission,” or tolerance of same.

This shouldn’t be a Dana Brown decision. It should have come all the way from the top, from the very beginning.